Here’s a short summary of a recent student project undertaken by Mist Hu (Loughborough University, School of Business and Economics. MSc Business Analytics / MSc Supply Chain & Logistics).
The purpose of the project was to provide data driven insights from the Idea Catalog and Mist decided to look at technology vendors to see if she could discern any insights suitable for horizon scanning - such as geographical location, technology maturity, type of technology, etc.
The Idea Catalog has over 2,000 companies listed from across the world and the first task was to see if there were any geographical clusters. Here's a graph of the United States with clusters around some (not all) major cities with many gaps in the middle.;
West Coast; Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle
East Coast; Philadelphia, Boston, New York
This contrasts with the (much smaller) United Kingdom where companies are much more evenly spread around the country.
Further analysis allowed a drill down of those companies to determine (in general) whether they were into research, technology development or producing operational equipment - this time based on the 6,500 entities in the Idea Catalog (each one is categorised by Technology Readiness Level, TRL).
Unfortunately, time for a project was short and did not allow further analysis on other factors (such as the type of technology) but it clearly demonstrated that we have a fantastically rich resource for horizon scanning, foresight analysis and technology assessment we can access.
A great job and thanks to Mist and Dr Alan French (supervisor). Also thanks to Duncan Robertson for managing the student allocation every year!
The Idea Catalog is a valuable knowledge resource - particularly for nuclear cleanup and decommissioning. Access to the standard plan is FREE (you just need to register) and is ideal for quick, serendipitous idea generation. The premium plan is a paid subscription tier that unlocks a number of additional features including insights/videos/papers on the entries, enhanced searching & filters, problem definition tools plus others.